Innovation

Breaking a Solution Ahead of Time

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When it comes to business practices, what you’re confident about today may be proven wrong tomorrow. I’ll explain.

When I was a kid, I’d go to the candy store and spin the squeaky, revolving rack of comic books to see if it held a new issue of “Sergeant Fury,” “Captain America,” “Iron Man,” “Spider-Man,” or “Thor.” If I spotted one, I’d stare at its cover for a minute or two to get a sense if the story hidden inside promised to be worth twelve cents (or twenty-five cents for a double issue).

Why didn’t I judge the comic by thumbing through it? If I tried, the store owner would lean over his counter and shout: “This isn’t a library. Are you looking or buying?”

I’d be forced into buying, because “looking” was akin to theft.

When I was growing up, most stores dissuaded you from sampling a product. Their reasoning? Maybe they thought if you got even a taste for free you wouldn’t value the product enough to pay for it. Maybe they wanted customers to absorb the transactional risk and judge the quality of a product on their own dime.

Such thinking now, of course, is considered unenlightened. It hinders sales. Instead of keeping products away from customers, businesses try hard to get them into people’s hands.

Want to play around with a software program? No problem. Go for the free ninety-day trial and see if you like it. Want to know if a certain car hugs the road? Don’t sweat it. Take the auto home for a few days and test it.

Going from the “no sample” strategy to the “try the complete product for free” strategy is a radical about-face. But you and I have seen other strategy reversals just as drastic.

Years ago, it was assumed that the smartest person in most companies was the leader. After all, the leader was in charge of the organization for a reason. In many organizations, that thinking has now changed. They believe in the genius of the group, and think its people are smarter in the aggregate than they are separately. These organizations put collaboration tools in place, so people can more closely work together.

Along the same lines, many organizations used to assume that their employees couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information; the hierarchy, therefore, hoarded data. Now, thanks to the influence of practices like Open Book Management, certain leaders share financial and strategic information with the company, so employees can take responsibility and make better educated business decisions.

I could go on recounting business strategies, like Reengineering and Management by Objectives, which were once thought to be best approach to solving a particular problem, but are now looked upon, at best, as one tool in a diverse strategy toolkit. But I won’t. I know you get the picture.

The point I’m driving at is this: Right now, you and I are using strategies in our business that will, one day soon, be thought of as wrongheaded. We’ll look back and think, “How could I have wasted so much time believing that?” or “focusing on that?” or “doing that?”

Rather than waiting for that day to come, get a jump on uncovering those strategies and on hatching alternate ways of doing things.

Think of it as a game. Look at how you prospect and sell. Look at your products and services. Look at your infrastructure and how you get things done. Look at your pet philosophy and manifesto ideas.

Even if what you’re doing is working, pretend it’s not. Pretend it’s broken and you’ve got to come up with something new – you have no option.

What would you try?

Is there a way, even a small way, of trying it now?

A Problem Well-stated is Half-solved

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Charles Kettering, the famed inventor and head of research for GM, said “a problem well-stated is half-solved.”

Here, then, are six steps you can take to state a business problem so its solutions become clearer:

1. State the problem in a sentence. A single sentence forces you to extract the main problem from a potentially complex situation. An example of a problem statement: “We need to increase revenue by 25%.”

2. Make the problem statement into a question. Turning the problem statement into a question opens the mind to possibilities: “How do we increase revenue by 25%?”

3. Restate the question in five ways. If you spin the question from a variety of perspectives, you’ll construct new questions that may provide intriguing answers.

For instance, try asking: “How could we increase revenue by 25% in a month?” “How could we increase it by 25% in an hour?” “How could we increase it by 25% in a minute?” “What could we stop doing that might cause a 25% revenue increase?” “What ways can we use our existing customer base to affect the increase?”

4. Give yourself thinking quotas. An arbitrary production quota gives you a better shot at coming up with something usable, because it keeps you thinking longer and with greater concentration.

When I asked you to “Restate the question five ways,” that was an example of an arbitrary quota. There’s nothing magical about five restatements. In fact, five is low. Ten, or even a hundred, would be far better.

5. Knock your questions. Whatever questions you’ve asked, assume they’re wrong-headed, or that you haven’t taken them far enough.

You might ask, “Why do we need an 25% increase at all? Why not a 5% increase? A 500% increase? A 5,000% increase? What other things in the business might need to change that would be as important as revenue?

6. Decide upon your new problem-solving question. Based on the thinking you’ve already done, this step may not even be necessary. Often, when you look at your situation from enough angles, solutions pop up without much more effort.

However, if you still need to pick a single question that summarizes your problem, and none seems perfect, force yourself to choose one that’s at least serviceable. Going forward is better than standing still.

Now you can start brainstorming.

Making Independent Musicians Independent

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My client, Jill Maurer, has a business that’s a week old. It’s called Bukoomusic. Here’s the story behind how it started.

A couple of years ago, Jill and a friend were sipping wine in a restaurant, when they saw a young waiter they hadn’t seen for weeks. They asked where he’d been, and he said he’d been on tour with his band. A couple of the other waiters, in fact, were his band mates. During the upcoming year, the group had lined up over 200 gigs.

Jill was impressed. Here was a group that could write and perform  their own songs, and arrange a lengthy tour. What puzzled her was why they still worked at the restaurant.

The waiter told her that without a record label backing the group, they couldn’t get enough exposure to break into the big time. They were knocking on record company doors, looking for representation, but still hadn’t caught a break.

Jill and her friend were back a few weeks later, when the waiter approached the table with good news. The group’s diligence had paid off, and they had secured a contract with a small label.

Jill again asked when he and his band mates would resign as waiters, so they could concentrate on playing music. The young man said they couldn’t ditch their jobs yet, since the deal they signed gave the label most of the rights to the music, as well as heavy creative control. They signed it because they didn’t think they had any options.

When Jill went home, she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d heard. The idea that dedicated artists had to sign away the rights to their work and couldn’t make a living wage doing what they were born to do aggravated her.

What’s more, she thought about all the great music the listening public was missing out on, because the labels were acting as gatekeepers. Executives were deciding what constituted sellable music, and some of their decisions were likely based more on the artists’ looks and gimmicks than their sound.

That’s when Jill decided to start Bukoomusic. It would be a website that acted as a central location for all types of independent musicians: professionals, struggling artists, even novices who had never sung before an audience. Anyone who wanted to be on the site, could be on the site. (“Think ‘YouTube for audio,’ says Jill. “Anyone can put their work on YouTube regardless of its quality.”)

The musicians would upload their songs, and could either give them away to the public for nothing, or charge a nominal fee for each download.

Even better, these musicians would retain full rights to their work.

They also wouldn’t have to pay  for uploading their music to the site, and would only pony up a percentage of the actual sales if the public bought a download of one of their songs or albums.

After months of development, Bukoomusic went live last week. Jill, an experienced entrepreneur who cofounded the pioneering software company, SlickEdit, decided to do a soft opening so she could work out any bugs.

As of this writing, seven independent artists have uploaded songs and albums to the site. Take a listen. And, if you have any musical talent yourself . . . .

Book Surfing, or "How to Get Good Ideas While Cleaning Your Room"

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For me, thinking divergently is a mania. I do it as much as possible. That is, I push myself to see things from odd angles and slam together ideas that don’t conventionally connect. (Steve Woodruff might say I’m restless.)

Because of this self-induced push to be creative, I’ve come up with some curious ideation techniques. I call them “situational techniques,” because they help you use your immediate surroundings to produce ideas.

One situational technique I often use is book surfing. I stumbled upon it years ago while organizing my home office.

My office was a mess. The bookcases were jammed with hundreds of books. There were so many books, in fact, that they spilled onto the floor. What’s more, the subjects were shuffled together: fiction, science, sports, psychology, poetry, history, magic, pop culture. Finding a specific book was rough. When I wanted to read one, I first had to recall its thickness and jacket color, and then I’d go on a tedious and uncertain hunt.

After one particularly frustrating hunt, I pulled the books from the cases, piled them in the center of the room, and started to shelve them in a more logical order. Doing that required that I think about each book’s content.

Would I, for instance, ever again open this copy of “The Executioner’s Song,” or should I donate it to the library? Would I more likely read Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” if I shelved it with the author’s novels and stories, or if I put it with the other books I owned on writing technique? What about my copy of “Send ‘Em One White Sock” by Rapp and Collins? When I first read it, I’d found many of the strategies useful. What were those strategies again?

In giving each book a cursory look, ideas started coming to me without much trying.

I got ideas based on a book’s content (“Bradbury says to write a story out of ‘pure indignation.’ So, if I were to write such a story, I’d write about the time . . . “) and title (“‘Send ‘Em One White Sock’ is actually one of many tactics in the book. So, if I were to write a book about positioning and wanted to title it by a single intriguing tactic, I might call it . . . ”).

The ideas also came from picking up two unrelated books at once (“Hmm, ‘Moneyball’ is about using metrics to measure a ballplayer’s ability, and then there’s ‘The Collected Screenplays of the Coen brothers.’ If I combined these two, I’d get a statistical way of measuring a Coen brothers’ screenplay. Or, I’d get a dark, funny screenplay about a baseball statistician”).

By the time I’d shelved the last book, I’d written down 87 ideas I didn’t have when I started my impromptu project.

Why, then, does book surfing work and how can you surf, too? First the reasons:

Reason #1. To get ideas, we regularly need to fill ourselves with new thoughts, stories, and experiences. That way, we have a fresh inventory of stimuli to draw from. The more information we take in and actively think about, the better we’ll be at using it.

Reason #2. The randomness of the information coming at you keeps you on your toes. It’s almost like attending an improv class. You’re forced to deal with what comes up.

Reason #3. In my version of book surfing, reorganizing my books really was the primary goal. Coming up with new ideas was secondary. The pressure to create, then, was off.

Now that you understand the purpose of this exercise, I challenge you to stand in your office (even if it’s on top of your book piles) and come up with three new ideas to write about. Send me photos of you amongst your books, and I’ll share them with blog readers.